March 25th, 2008

Here is a link to the video that I took. It is of Naomi Nye’s last poem, I didn’t remember the name of it. Sorry for the bootleg quality of the video (I tried to hide my camera at the start), but she had more of a vocal performance. So no need to see it really, just listen. Click here

March 24th, 2008

Seeing poetry being performed live by actual poets was a great experience. It was awesome seeing how they stressed certain words and phrases and how they overall put emotion on the poem. It was like listening to a piece of music being performed by the writer in front of you. They know when to put emphasis and stress certain words that make them stand out and stick to the audience (even if some of it seemed a bit silly). I thought most of the poetry was successful in giving off the emotions that they were shooting for. Some of the poems seemed to be more on the humorous side, so I took them a little less seriously, but they still had their own message and still were at least slightly convincing in their cause.The role of poetry is many things. From what I got from listening to the poets in D.C., I would guess that role of poetry for them is the voice of the author, the voice of a generation, the “voice of the voiceless”, and maybe even a spark to start of the fire of revolution, but there are many more categories that poems fall into.The poets seemed to be convincing with their work by the way they portrayed it: they were full of passion and very confident when in front of the audience. I felt that the only person that might have not been (fully) convincing was Alix Olson. She seemed to tell some of her poems as if it was a stand-up comedy routine. She still got her point across, but those acts could’ve been done in a comedy club instead. My favorite poet who performed would have to be Sonia Sanchez. It might have just been the environment, but I felt that she had a very personal message to everyone there; and from the reactions of the audience, her message was well received and had an impact on them. I greatly liked that (for all the poets), the way the audience reacted to each poem differently. That is something you only get when you see a poetry performance live.

March 10th, 2008

For “No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo (Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By)”, I found the general theme of the poetry to be different from the ending. The start of the poetry seemed to give off a feeling of gloominess and darkness but still giving a hint of hope or happiness. The ending with the poetry with the titles of animals, however, gave off different feelings. It used personification and gave metaphors and similes to greatly describe the animals. The relationship between the speaker and the non-human world seemed to be that off appreciation but also that of cautiousness, telling the reader to take a closer look at the world. One poem that seemed to stand out to me was “Earth” on page 65. I like the use of words and how the speaker describes the earth as being composed of all that is dead. This poem seemed to be one of the darker poems. For “And So You Go, Never to Come Back”, he continues the theme from before by still using words that pertain to death (dead, dieing, etc) but there are slightly more poems that gives the reader a positive feeling. In the poem “Niagara Falls” on page 95, the speaker tells of the perpetual waves of water coming down the falls with “From the death of waves spawn others”. This poem stood out because it was one of the few that told about nature directly and gave off a sense of awe. Another poem that stood out was “To a girl who died in the sea”. I enjoyed this poem because it focused on what good can come from death. With the line ‘Now time which ruins all cannot touch your beauty’, the speaker tells that when the girl died, she will always stay that way. Her looks, her age, her personality, now set it stone by her death and cannot be changed. The speaker also tells that her death, although sad, will now make her apart of the sea and she will now contribute to the beauty of the sea.